Rhetoric and Language

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How to be a Japanese Hipster. Keanu Reeves On Sad Keanu. Fallacy and Court Tactics. Beyond Relevance: Home. George Monbiot on climate change and Big Tobacco. ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation.

Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids.
Texts From Bennett. Texts From Last Night.

Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler. I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was. But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same. I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.
How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up page views. One of my friends posted a link to last week's Jezebel post titled "The Daily Show's Woman Problem" as her Gmail chat status, alongside the words "Every woman must read this.

" Obediently, I clicked, and read a lengthy post that began with the assertion that The Daily Show is a "boys' club where women's contributions are often ignored and dismissed.
" When I finished reading, I was outraged! But not, as the majority of Jezebel readers and commenters seemed to be, at The Daily Show.
Gweek 061: Trust Me, I'm Lying. Click here to play the podcast.

In this episode of the Gweek podcast I interviewed Ryan Holiday. Ryan’s the author of Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He's a media strategist who started his career as an assistant to Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and is currently the director of marketing at American Apparel. Bonus!
The Eccentric Eclectic's Blogs About Everything and Anything. Www.LRIGDON.com SEX — – the very word immediately grabs people’s attention.

So why is it such a taboo subject? In today’s supposedly modern society, sex has become something so ghastly that we would rather watch movies like Saw and Hellraiser than allow ourselves to watch people having sex.
Philip Pilkington: The Fear Industry – Austrian School Propaganda and the Gold Market. By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London.

You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil When you survey the websites and the pundits of Austrian economics on the internet you tend to get a niggling feeling that they’re trying to sell you something. Of course, every writer is ultimately trying to earn a living but with many Austrians it seems to be a little different. It feels more like many are just churning certain content out in order to flog a certain line which, while certainly not quite mainstream, nevertheless seems geared toward generating if not income then at least traffic. To say that some of this comes across as spam-like would be slightly unfair, but not too unfair.
The Battle for the Minds: Modern Gaming and Propaganda. Propaganda in videogames is becoming ever-more prevalent, harnessed by governments, Special Interest Groups, militaries and the PR industry to indoctrinate an overwhelmingly young audience of gamers.

\n\nHe reads another.
\n\nHe mumbles to himself: "What the fuck is a porpentine?
"\n\nHe makes a note to advance a Hegelian theory of the crystal laser goddess.
\n\n[[He hacks something together.]]
Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the biggest troll on the Web. Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch.

He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day.
LEAKED NORTH KOREAN DOCUMENTARY ‘EXPOSES WESTERN PROPAGANDA’ (AND IT’S SCARY HOW TRUE IT IS)
Sabine is a YouTube user who, during a visit to family living in South Korea in April of this year, was given a DVD by a man and a woman claiming to be North Korean “defectors”, and was asked to translate the film so it could be posted on the internet and reach a wider audience.

What the DVD turned out to be was something much more than Sabine, or anyone else, probably would’ve imagined, and something that certainly has found a widespread audience on the internet over the last month or so – it was a film called “PROPAGANDA”, a documentary about capitalism, imperialism, mass manipulation of western culture for the purpose of commodification, and how it permeates every aspect of the lives of blissfully ignorant, borderline zombie masses.

Should Presidential Campaigns Spend More Money Manipulating Intrade? - Derek Thompson. With two weeks before the election, most political followers are glued to national and swing-state polls. But some junkies and journalists swear by Intrade, an online betting market where investors place money on the next president (among other things). But this morning, something very weird happened on Intrade. Mitt Romney began the day trailing the president 60 to 40 (i.e.: his chance of winning was priced at 40%). Suddenly, Romney surged to 49%, and the president's stock collapsed, despite no game-changing news in the press.
The wrong budget analogy. Washington's renewed obsession with government budget deficits has become a major obstacle to dealing with the U.S. unemployment crisis. At the root of this misplaced focus are widespread misconceptions about the role of deficits in the economy.

The fact that high unemployment and budget deficits are occurring at the same time has generated confusion about the real sources of the slump. The increased deficit is a consequence, not a cause, of the downturn. When economic activity falls, so does tax revenue. Some categories of government spending, such as unemployment benefits, automatically rise during a recession. Politicians of both parties have furthered the misunderstanding by frequently drawing an analogy between the federal budget and household budgets.
Where family ends for super committee and budget cutters. Kai Ryssdal: I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say this has not been a a banner year for economic bipartisanship. We had the standoff over the debt ceiling. Now the super committee is deadlocked a week before its deadline. Congress still hasn't passed a budget for the fiscal year we're already in.
Why The Federal Budget is Not Your Household Budget.

Well, we made it through the debt ceiling. Sort of. There was a large budget cut (make no mistake, 1 trillion dollars is a lot of money), but small in the overall scope of things. Is our debt long-term solvent?
Rereading Tyrion II (AGOT-ACOK) - Page 2 - Re-read Project - A Forum of Ice and Fire - Page 2. Tyrion IX overviewThis chapter takes place inside Tywin’s “war room.” A courier from the lines of battle gives a report of what transpired.
Syntax - Grammar (Overview)
While in womb, babies begin learning language from their mothers. High resolutionClick to expand Pacific Lutheran University A new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard. Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered.

The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought. Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard.
Noam Chomsky: "After 60+ Years of Generative Grammar: A Personal Perspective"
Optimality Theory - is grammar about rules or constraints?
On Computational and Chomskyan Linguistic Theory by Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay. Computational Linguistics: A Dissenter's Voice by Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay. The Association for Computational Linguistics: What is Computational Linguistics?
What is Computational Linguistics? Simply put, computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective.

Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical").
Computational Linguistics. A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition. Microsoft Word - NLP.web.doc - NLP.web.pdf. Retrospect and prospect in computer-based translation - MTS-1999.pdf. Building a large annotated corpus of English. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language.
Bowerman_1988_The-No.pdf. Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 58, No. 302 (Jun., 1963), pp. 275-309. Mind, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 236 (Oct., 1950), pp. 433-460. Number Facts: number 0 up to number 500 and more. Excerpts from three articles on education: Dorothy Sayers, Richard P. Feynman, John Taylor Gatto.

Politics and the English Language - Essay by George Orwell. Corporations are manufacturing uncertainty about scientific findings. Now scientists are fighting back.
Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts by Chris Hoofnagle. The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck. Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts. Is Crime a Virus or a Beast? One Word Can Make a Big Difference.